Windows Weekly 372: Let the Bezel Be Big

In the latest episode of Windows Weekly, Leo Laporte, Mary Jo Foley and I discuss the Microsoft layoffs, five Microsoft communication miscues from just the past week, Lenovo's own communication miscue, Microsoft's quarterly earnings, and of course the wonderful OneNote parody video.

ProShot for Windows Phone solves big problems with Windows Phone's other Camera apps. But you need to spend a bit of time configuring it for optimal use. Why pay $2 for a camera app replacement? It's fast. And it excels at night shots (when configured correctly).

One of the announcements from the Partner Conference that didn't get a ton of play. Machine learning preview is open. On day 1, over 1,000 users had provisioned roughly 1,300 modeling workspaces on Azure ML, and these new users had built and run over 2,000 experiments and deployed over 50 ML web services on Azure. Worth a bookmark: Microsoft's Machine Learning blog at http://blogs.technet.com/b/machinelearning/

Codename pick of the week: OneCore

There is an internal MS name for the shared Windows stuff (that starts with the NT core but goes beyond it). It's OneCore

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I think Windows 9 is going to be the best Windows OS yet. Microsoft has the touch friendly things nailed down, now they can build upon that and make a Windows OS that's superb especially for traditional PCs as well as tablets!

Paul was exactly right about Universal Apps. Yes, the features that help facilitate these apps in Visual Studio are welcome. But they just make it a bit easier to do what developers have been doing all along. Some bloggers have claimed that Universal Apps are going to dramatically increase the number of apps in the stores, etc. Some think that Universal Apps are going to be "better" for some reason. But really, it is the alignment of APIs and system services that increases the percentage of the code that can be common.

One thing to watch out for or just be aware of is how WinDirStat (and perhaps WizTree) handle OneDrive files in Windows 8.1. In particular, watch out for the sizes of OneDrive files that show up in your folders, but are not actually on the local drive.

WinDirStat uses the size of the file, not the "size on disk" of the file, so the results will be skewed accordingly. The developers have an issue logged to address this.

Paul, I'm curious ... did Amiga BASIC commit the same kinds of sins like QuickBasic did where PRINT "HELLO" would create a 15KB executable out of something that should have been 750 bytes? (To be fair, QB got better once PDS 7 came out.) In the days of slow 20 MB hard drives that was tough to put up with. :-)

What I Use

Like many, I was hoping to see a new Lumia flagship before the end of 2014, and while I was pleasantly surprised in some ways by both the Lumia 735 and 830, neither offers the level of performance or best-in-market camera quality I had come to expected from Microsoft/Nokia's high-end devices. So I pulled the trigger on an unlocked Windows Phone flagship that will hopefully take me through at least the first half of this year. Or until Microsoft gets off its low-end fixation and satisfies the needs of its biggest fans....More

It's been a while since the last What I Use, but there haven't been many major changes since late last year: Surface Pro 3 has become my go-to travel companion, I've added a third cellphone line for testing Windows Phone, Android and iPhone side-by-side, and have rotated through some new tablets and other devices. We've also switched from FIOS to Comcast and added to our set-top box collection....More